Ki te Kotahi te kākaho ka whati, ki te kāpuia e kore e whati

19/6/2023

Public institutions tend to reflect the society in which they are embedded. So it is for Aotearoa.

Like it or not, in Aotearoa, our shared institutions reflect and will increasingly reflect Te Tiriti. Te Tiriti states the conditions under which Iwi, Hapū, Whānau, Whanui, Māori and the Crown agreed to cooperate in the development of a unified nation. The need for cooperation between Māori and the Crown, and between Māori and other people who decide to settle in Aotearoa, is just as strong today as it was in 1840.

Indeed the combination of Te Ao Māori approaches to collective decision-making and Te Ao Colonial preferences have come together in a way that now makes the so-called New Zealand model distinctive internationally. Let’s have a quick look.

While the indigenous institutions that pre-dated colonial government have adjusted, settler preferences combined with the deliberately engineered nature of the British colonial government have left a legacy of a powerful, central government with primacy over other institutions.

The main guardrail to this primacy has been a combination of the trail-blazing wairua of mana whenua and the settlers’ pragmatic “give anything a go” attitude. It is a wairua that exhibits itself as preparedness and staunchness to ensure Te Tiriti was and is honoured. It is a settler attitude that hopes not to replicate the class-ridden society from which they fled.

Together – this wairua and this attitude – have created a public culture that is resistant to hierarchy, bureaucracy and everything that flows from the poneketanga. While the resistance is also in part due to the fact that the Westminster system was received rather than forged from our shared national experience, suffice it to say, once the public culture is comfortable with a policy idea, our public institutions have a tendency to sudden change and quick implementation, which in other democratic countries would have taken longer and probably would not happen at all.

Said differently, my hypothesis is that our shared history has created a public culture that makes radical structural and policy changes faster and more readily than in societies where the central or federal government has been created in a context of needing to accommodate older and other institutions.

This should serve both as a strength and as a warning.

Examples to date include: the dissolution of the provincial system, the early introduction of the vote for women, the ready participation in distant wars, the early and comprehensive introduction of social security, think big import substitution, the national wage and price freeze, the early adoption of freedom of information, wholesale economic reform, integration of Te Tiriti o Waitangi into the statute, radical central and local government reform, the introduction of a proportional representation electoral system, a national resource management regime, withdrawal from ANZUS, the COVID-19 response, the polytech and health reforms – both of which put Ao Māori concepts at the heart of the changes, and the living standards framework that sits alongside He Ara Waiora – a uniquely indigenous way of understanding public finance.

Looking at this list, you can see how our institutions are generally marked by stability and incrementalism, with political processes producing large-scale departures from the past. It is almost like stasis characterises our system, with only political crises or an emergency being able to produce large-scale change.

The warning is this, and it is twofold.

First, is this really what we want for our public institutions? Of course, one of the great strengths of this model is that Aotearoa can respond quickly to changing external conditions. Good examples are the removal of subsidies on agriculture. Another example is the COVID-19 response. But the same strength can also be a weakness if the things of long-term importance are crowded out by short-term agility and emergencies: especially if the state gets too used to using its powers without adequately considering the consequences.

Secondly, across the anglo jurisidictions we are seeing the emergence of deliberative practice. Governing is no longer dependent on winning elections. Those who win elections now have the challenge of maintaining the trust and confidence of the entire nation, not just those who voted for them, while bringing all the policy advisory networks along on the journey. In Aotearoa, especially, the electorate is brittle and resentful about the overuse of state powers in respect of the regional lockdowns. One might even go so far as to say the government lost its social license – and probably without realising it. It will be interesting to see how an incoming government deals with the demand for more participation – not less – in the daily work of central governance. Maybe this is the thing that will make Aotearoa beyond Westminster. Time will tell.

Lots to think about and clarify here. I’ll update this as my thinking evolves.